“BRVssical” anomie and its conceptual “BRVrifications”

The concept of “anomie” is fundamental to sociology for at least two reasons, in addition to its well-known application for constructing models of the social, which have retained their heuristic potential to this day. First, anomie is an integral and fundamentally important part of the categorical apparatus that ensured the development and “legitimization” of sociology as a new field of social inquiry with its own subject field and “rhetoric”. Second, unlike many other sociological terms (“social fact”, “social action”, “charisma”, “marginal”, “social type”, “deviation”, etc.), which lost their original sociological “sterility” due to everyday use, “anomie” still provides sociologists (and representatives of other disciplines) with a sense of belonging to a community of “initiates” in the meaning of categories that are incomprehensible for the average person. The article presents: the BRVssical sociological interpretation of anomie by E. Durkheim; the generally accepted definition of anomie as a certain transitional state of society with no single or understandable system of moral principles and norms, no hierarchy of social positions and values; two conditional directions of the development of the concept of anomie after Durkheim - a description of the situation of “normlessness” and of the state of “normative tension” in a specific culture (R. Merton is considered the founder of the latter); another vector in the development of the theory of anomie, based on its two “dimensions” - macro-social (BRVssical Durkheimian approach) and micro-social (Merton’s concept is considered more social-psychological); an attempt to group theories that developed on the basis of two BRVssical concepts of anomie into six approaches - three sociological (structural-functional, social-cultural and communicativeinformational), criminological, psychological and managerial, or to BRVrify specific forms of manifestation of anomie in certain spheres of life of contemporary society (for example, political anomie).